Basel I Sermaye Yeterlili ğ i Uzla ş ısı’nın Genel Kapsamı ve Sermaye Yeterliliğinin Hesaplanması

O projeto Homo Sacer, que marcará o pensamento de Giorgio Agamben em sua fase mais recente, busca colocar em operação uma crítica do aparato político ocidental, sustentada por uma leitura da modernidade que aponta a persistência em seu núcleo de dispositivos ligados a uma metafísica negativa de origem jurídico-teológica. Tal crítica será construída fundamentalmente a partir de uma leitura dos estudos biopolíticos elaboradores por εichel Foucault, aliada a um segundo debate, realizado entre Carl Schmitt e Walter Benjamin, em torno da relação entre soberania e estado de exceção. Para o pensador italiano, o Estado moderno estaria marcado pela coincidência progressiva entre espaço político, gestão da vida e a generalização de dispositivos próprios ao Estado de Exceção. A partir da tese, Agamben afirmará o campo de concentração, e não a polis, como o paradigma político fundamental do Ocidente. Nesse contexto, o presente artigo buscará apontar a centralidade do uso bastante específico que Agamben fará do método paradigmático. Sua compreensão busca não somente lançar luz sobre a afirmação de uma íntima solidariedade entre democracia e totalitarismo, mas também elaborar uma perspectiva metodológica pouco abordada na obra do autor.

Palavras-chave: Giorgio Agamben, método, paradigma, arqueologia, exemplo. ABSTRACT

The Homo Sacer project, the pillar of Giorgio Agamben’s later thought, seeks to operate a critique of the Western political apparatus, supported by a reading of modernity that points to the persistence, at its very core, of a negative metaphysics of juridico-theological origin. This critique derives primarily from a reading of εichel Foucault’s studies on biopolitics, allied with a second debate, held between Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, on the relationship between sovereignty and the state of exception. For the Italian thinker, the modern state is marked by the progressive coincidence between the political space, life-management and the state of exception.

121 Based on this thesis, Agamben elects the concentration camp rather than the polis as the fundamental political paradigm of the West. In this context, the paper seeks to identify the centrality of the very specific use of the paradigmatic method implemented by Agamben, primarily drawn from the reflections of εichel Foucault. This understanding serves not only to elucidate the affirmation of a tight solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism, but also a methodological perspective rarely addressed in the author’s work.

122 It is possible that to seem – it is to be, As the sun is something seeming and it is. The sun is an example. What it seems It is and in such seeming all thing are. - ''Description Without Place'', Wallace Stevens.41

We might contend that the Homo Sacer project, the pillar of Giorgio Agamben’s later thought, strives to operate a critique of the western political apparatus, supported by a reading of modernity that points toward the persistence at its very core of a negative metaphysics of juridico-theological origin.

Fundamentally, this critique is drawn from εichel Foucault’s reading of a phenomenon intrinsic to the dynamic of the εodern Stateμ the insertion of human life within the mechanisms of power over bodies and the calculating management of life through a series of interventions and regulatory controls — i.e., the biopolitics of a population. Through a genealogy of power, Foucault sought to demonstrate a fundamental change that occurred between the 1ιth _{and 1κ}th _{centuries and saw a shift}

of paradigm from the sovereign to disciplinary power. However, to this the Italian philosopher wanted to add a second debateμ that between Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin on the relationship between sovereignty and the state of exception. For Agamben modernity is characterized by a progressive coincidence between the political space, life-management, and the generalization of the tools proper to the State of Exception - electing the ‘concentration camp’ rather than the ‘polis’ the fundamental political paradigm of the West.

It is even likely that if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. The ‘enigmas’ (Furet, 19κ5 p.ι) that our century (the 20th_{) has proposed}

to historical reason, and that remain with us (Nazism is only the most disquieting among them), will be solved only on the terrain—biopolitics—on which they were formed. Only within a biopolitical horizon will it be possible to decide whether the categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right/left, private/public,

41 STEVENS, Wallace. Description without Place [Poem]The Sewanee Review, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Autumn, 1945), p. 559

123 absolutism/democracy, etc.) — and which have been steadily dissolving, to the point of entering today into a real zone of indistinction—will have to be abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost in that very horizon. And only a reflection that, taking up Foucault’s and Benjamin’s suggestion, thematically interrogates the link between bare life and politics, a link that secretly governs the modern ideologies seemingly most distant from one another, will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same time, return thought to its practical calling (Agamben 199κ, 10).

Glancing back at the closing pages of Homo Sacer - Sovereign Power and Bare Life I, we see that Agamben looks to structure his book around three core ideas, only the last of which concerns the present paper. Agamben starts off by presenting the thesis that the original political relation is not the social contract, but the ‘ban’. He then goes on to contend that the fundamental activity of sovereign power is to produce ‘bare life’. δastly, he concludes that the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West is not the ‘polis’, but the ‘concentration camp’.

It is on the last of the three that most of the criticisms lodged against Agamben’s recent work have focused, and it therefore warrants more careful analysis. The Italian philosopher declares thatμ

…the birth of the camp in our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself. It is produced at the point at which the political system of the modern nation-state, which was founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the State) and mediated by automatic rules for the inscription of life (birth or the nation), enters into a lasting crisis, and the State decides to assume directly the care of the nation’s biological life as one of its proper tasks (199κ, 99).

As such, the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule (199κ, 96).

…and it does so as the most absolute biolithic space ever witnessed, one in which power and pure biological life clash without any mediation whatsoever. In this sense, it configures the paradigm of political space, its hidden template, the world’s new biopolitical nomos (Agamben, 2000, 41).

If this is true, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and

124 juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime committed there and whatever its denomination and specific topography (Agamben 2000, 9κ).

In the light of affirmations of this nature, it is not hard to understand the deep- ridden controversies that have surrounded his work. Indeed, the idea that even fifty years after the fall of Nazism the spectre of Auschwitz is still threaded deep into the fabric of our political lives, or worse yet, that it is its truest manifestation, supersedes even the most pessimistic left-wing predictions. As Durantaye states, the Adornian doubt whether poetry could ever be possible again after Auschwitz pales considerably in comparison with the contention that the concentration camp is the biopolitical paradigm of our times.

In a lesser-known line from an essay written in 1939-40 on German deportation policy, Adorno statesμ “we live in the age of the concentration camp” (Adorno GS, 10.2κ6), a reasonable conclusion to be drawn for someone who had witnessed the unrivalled barbarities of the Second World War. However, the panorama devised by Agamben is of an altogether different natureμ for him, the concentration camp is not just a terrible anomaly in civilization, but the rule we have come dangerously close to embracing.

One of the most bruising attacks on Agamben’s thesis classifies it as an “unprecedented provocation” (ungereure Provokation) (εayer 199ι, 21). A series of other criticisms follows the lead of Dominick δa Capra, who sees Agamben’s project as “an obstinate and radical critique of the present in the light of the past, conferring a central role upon aporia, paradox, hyperbole and provocative strategies” (δa Capra 200ι, 161ν see also Ternes 200ι, 114). Alison Ross states that “Agamben’s approach reverses Foucault’s ascending methodology and leaves us to ask what the reasoning from extreme instances tells us about the hold of Agamben’s analysis on the phenomena it wishes to decode” (Ross 200κ, 6). Agamben’s compatriot Antonio Negri identifies the impossibility of generalizing upon Auschwitzμ “δife and death in the camps is nothing more than life and death in the camps—a chapter in a 20th-century civil war, a horrible spectacle of the direction of capitalism and of ideology revealing its true will” (Negri and Hardt 2001).

125 Agamben’s etymological or genealogical methodology. According to the Argentine thinkerμ

reading his texts, one often has the feeling that he jumps too quickly from having established the genealogy of a term, a concept or an institution, to determine its actual working in a contemporary context, that in some sense the origin has a secret determining priority over what follows from it (δacau 200ι, 12).

So the result of Agamben’s genealogical endeavours is not just a rigid structuralism, but a teleological bent as well – ironically two of his project’s main adversaries. δaclau therefore suggests that the nihilism inherent to the Italian’s conclusions negates the potentiality of the structural diversity of the present political conjuncture and consequently of all forms of political action. Such aporia is encapsulated in the very image of the concentration camp as the paradigm of western politics

by unifying the whole process of modern political construction around the extreme and absurd paradigm of the concentration camp, Agamben does more than present a distorted historyμ he blocks any possible exploration of the emancipatory possibilities opened by our modern heritage (δacau 200ι, 22).

In fact, we might establish a common denominator among the criticisms levelled against the first volume of Homo Sacer by identifying a fundamental point that runs transversally through the issues raised by these criticisms and which, paradoxically, is strangely absent in most of what is said about his work. The reach of Agamben’s thesis seems to derive from the highly specific use he makes of the paradigmatic method, which he appropriates from the work of εichel Foucault. Understanding this method would therefore not only elucidate one of the main veins running through Agamben’s work, but would also shed light upon a perspective hitherto scantily addressed in his oeuvre.

The exemplarity of the concentration camp

The concept of the paradigm first emerges in the work of Giorgio Agamben in The Coming Community, published in 1990, and therefore coincides with his more

126 strictly political writings, thematizing not only the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also the Tiananmen Square massacre. The abovementioned work would seem to pursue dual aims. On one hand, it takes a look at two events that marked the political history of the 20th _{century, while, on the other, it contributes to a debate simmering among the}

French left, which involved the possibility of imagining a political community in which submission to certain normative criteria based on utilitarian calculations was not a precondition of belonging. For quite some time, such thinkers as George Bataille, εaurice Blanchot and Jean-δuc Nancy racked their brains to conceive of a community that was not determined by a functionalist model of social life. The crux of the matter was the reduction of the community, whether to a collection of distinct individuals or to a common substance, such as we find in Fascism.42

Agamben wades into the debate by attempting to understand the relationship between the individual and the community as akin to that between the whole and its part. It is in this context that the notion of the paradigm first emerges. ‘Example’, the title of chapter three of The Coming Community, begins with a presentation of the opposition between the universal and the individual, which, for Agamben, “has its origin in language” (Agamben 1993a, 9). What we have here is the classical antinomy according to which the act of calling something a tree, a treat or traitor transforms the thing in its concrete singularity into a member of a class whose meaning derives from a common property. The word ‘tree’, Agamben tells us, “designates all trees indifferently, insofar as it posits the proper universal significance in place of singular ineffable trees” (1993a, 9), thus transforming singularities into members of a class—a movement redolent of that by which political communities are formed around shared characteristics. As such, language, just like politics, will forever remain pinned between the universality of its generalizations and the singularity of the entities that, as the foundations of these same generalizations, go on being inadequately represented.43

However, Agamben argues that there is one notion that escapes this antinomy, namely the concept of the ‘example’μ “Neither particular nor universal, the example is

42 On this, seeμ BATAIδδE, Georges. «δa souveraineté». Oeuvres Complètes. VIII. ParisμGallimard,1992ν BδANCHOT, εaurice. La communauté inavouable. Parisμ εinuit, 199ιν NANCY, Jean-δuc. La communauté désoeuvrée. Paris μ Christian Bourgois, 1990. 43 We can detect echoes of this same concern in the closing pages of Homo Sacer, when Agamben, returning to the notion of the ‘ban’ as the original political relation, affirmsμ “The first of these calls into question every theory of the contractual origin of state power and, along with it, every attempt to ground political comunities in something like a ‘belonging’, whether it be founded on popular, national, religious, or any other identity”.

12ι a singular object that presents itself as such” (1993a, 10) – in other words, the example is simultaneously part of a whole and the defining criterion of that whole. By proving its own criterion of inclusion, the example remains ambiguously positioned in the class its represents best, being neither wholly included within it, nor totally excluded from it.

This apparently simple affirmation will be of extreme importance in the philosopher’s later works. In the years following its publication, Agamben employs the concept of the paradigm with increasing frequency. We find, for example, the ‘source of love or Narcissus’ mirror’ in Stanzas posited as the ‘exemplary paradigm’ of “the phantom converted into an authentic object of love” (Agamben 1993b, 99). In Means without Ends, largely dedicated to “finding genuine political paradigms” (2000, 15), we see Agamben elect Hannah Arendt’s figure of the ‘refugee’ as “the paradigm of a new historical consciousness” (9-10). In Homo Sacer, the concept plays a pivotal role not least for adequately working the notions of inclusion/exclusion in describing the paradoxical nature of sovereignty, but also in providing the methodological basis for his later writings. However, after their publication and subsequent controversies, Agamben embarked on a series of courses and interviews to elucidate upon the themeμ “I strove to apply the same genealogical and paradigmatic method as Foucault” (Agamben and Sacco 2010, 3). So, in order to expand upon our reflection, we will need to understand how the paradigm functioned in Foucault’s thought.

δike the Italian thinker, εichel Foucault does not provide a definition of what he understands by paradigm in the works in which he initially employed the term, so, to an extent, its meaning has to be deduced from his method. In fact, Foucault only makes use of the word in the sense attributed to it by Agamben in one text, A History of Insanity in the Classical Age, in which he refers to Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew as “un paradigme raccourci de l'histoire” (Foucault 19ι2, p. 432).

For the Frenchman as for the Italian, we might say that the meaning of the term—example—is not unlike that which Plato ascribes to its Greek counterpart paradigm, or para-deigma.44 _{The best-known paradigm developed by Foucault, and of}

which Agamben makes clear use, is the ‘panopticon’ in Discipline and Punish, the posterboy for a new era of disciplinary power and governmental control. The idea has its origins in a book by the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, published in 1ικι, in which he

44 A correlate origin is given for the German Bei-spiel. Seeμ Agamben, The Coming

12κ envisions a circular prison built around an inspection house from which the prisoners could be watched uninterruptedly.

The building is circular. The apartments of the prisoners occupy the circumference. You may call them, if you please, the cells. These cells are divided from one another, and the prisoners by that means secluded from all communication with each other, by partitions in the form of radii issuing from the circumference towards the centre, and extending as many feet as shall be thought necessary to form the largest dimension of the cell. The apartment of the inspector occupies the centreν you may call it if you please the inspector’s lodge. [...] Each cell has, in the outward circumference, a window, large enough not only to light the cell, but to afford light enough to the correspondent part of the lodge. The inner circumference of the cell is formed by an iron grating so light as not to screen any part of the cell from the inspector’s view.45

Though the British parliament went ahead with Bentham’s proposal and constructed such a prison in δondon in 1ι94, in terms of historical causality the model could hardly be said to have exercised any real influence. However, that would seem to be Foucault’s point precisely. For the French thinker, the panoptic paradigm exemplifies far more than Bentham could ever have imagined. In the ‘panopticon’, Foucault would appear to have found what he considered to be the political coordinates hidden within Bentham’s day, a sprawling historical mantle underpinning the individual constructions. The public demonstrations of sovereign power inherent to the acts of torture and immolation, which Foucault describes at such length were giving way to subtler forms of wielding power, forms that no longer sought to shock the subject into submission before a spectacle of violence, but opted for round-the-clock surveillance instead. As Durantaye observes, “between the lines of Bentham’s plans, Foucault glimpsed the dream of institutional control that was coming to full fruition, for the first time, in its contemporaneity” (Durantaye 2009, 216).

The historical approach through paradigms seems to call into question not only the causal structures of the traditional historical methods, but also Foucault’s right to call himself an historian. The panoptic paradigm is presented as more than an example with a broad temporal range within a given historical moment, but as an example with